Brighton '06, the final gig

Tony Blair made his last speech to the TUC yesterday. We had been promised a fight. Well, you can forget that. The modern TUC is a reserved and decorous organisation. They should leave the punch-ups to real men with red blood in their veins, like the Women's Institute.

Instead, what we got was the first gig in Tony's farewell tour. You expected them to be selling T-shirts for £35 with all the dates listed: Brighton, Manchester, Westminster, Blue Peter, Songs of Praise. It was an almost elegiac performance from the soon-to-be prime minister emeritus. Regrets, he had a few. But then again, too few to mention. And mention them he had no intention of doing.

The demonstrations were pathetic. Thoughts of breweries and piss-ups came to mind. This lot couldn't organise a tea party in the Typhoo factory. As he started speaking a dozen or so RMT members held up bits of paper marked "Go". Then they ambled out, looking as passionate and angry as a group of football fans who've decided to get to the gents before the half-time rush.

At various points in the speech there were a few boos, or when he said "There is a large part of the western world inclined to believe that the true threat is George Bush, not Islamic extremism," we heard a very slight cheer, as if on some distant playing field a mother had just seen her son take a wicket.

Not that the genuine applause was much either. Given that this was the last appearance by the man who brought more electoral success for his party than any other prime minister in more than 100 years, this may seem a trifle churlish. But that's the TUC for you.

They sat there like middle-management executives listening to the 15th presentation of the day, this one entitled: "The World As Our Oyster: Meeting The Challenge of Globalisation", which is more or less exactly what they were.

He managed to make a joke of it. "Thank you for that warm reception. More or less," he said. He had clearly come prepared for much worse. As one or two tiny jeers plopped into the silence, he said: "For people who are hostile to a Labour government and all that we have tried to achieve, you are doing precisely what they want. Not very sensible," which might have worked if there had been a rolling barrage of scorn, waiting for the TV news.

The gist was that they might not like him, but at least he was Labour. For 18 years they had had neither sight nor sound of a Labour prime minister. Some of course might have felt they still hadn't, but if they did they were too polite, or too torpid, to mention it.

He got on to Iraq and Afghanistan. No regrets here either. "We should be proud of what we are doing there," he said, and a solitary cry of "rubbish" rose into the clammy air, then fell back like a dead pigeon, or a friend of Dick Cheney.

Then there was a glancing reference to "the politicking of the past two weeks", which would give way to "true politics" delivering "progress". That was it.

If he had gone on to announce that the bar would be free for an hour he might have received a more enthusiastic response. Then he took questions from people who did seem angry - about privatising health and prisons, cutting jobs in the Department for Work and Pensions, establishing city academies and so forth.

Finally, he walked to the front of the stage for his coda - like a rock group saving their biggest hit for the encore - in which he listed all his other chart-toppers: low unemployment, the minimum wage, Sure Start.

He offered us a garland of simple truths: "You can't please everyone all the time"; "You'll never get a government in which everything is fine"; "Difficult decisions are hard to take, but it's a privilege to take them."